NY Dems Squabble Over Amazon HQ

Labor: Organize Amazon!

To both fanfare and protest, Amazon announced plans last November to build new corporate headquarters in Queens and Arlington, Virginia, only to pull the plug on the New York City location three months later. The reversal was greeted with dismay by some Democrats, particularly NYC mayor Bill de Blasio and New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who had extensively wooed the tech giant. Others, though, such as Congressional starlet Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, welcomed the news, having objected to the $3 billion incentives package offered by her fellow Democrats to Amazon. The squabbling among these capitalist politicians has not subsided. But one thing is certain: working people and the poor do not have a stake in agitating over where capitalist enterprises like Amazon set up shop. The crucial task for labor is to launch an aggressive campaign to organize Amazon across the country.

The bidding war for Amazon’s HQ2 was a spectacle. Elected officials competed to shower the country’s second-largest private employer with tax breaks, land deals and other perks. Several bids were substantially more generous than New York’s, but its governor did offer to change his name to “Amazon Cuomo.” Now, he is pleading with company execs, including Jeff Bezos, to give NYC one more chance.

At the same time, there is nothing remotely anti-capitalist about Ocasio-Cortez and others in the Democratic Socialists of America, the Democratic Party component that organized opposition to the NYC deal, denouncing it as “corporate welfare.” Notably, even billionaire ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg and a group financed by the Koch brother anti-union zealots found fault with handouts to a company valued at over $1 trillion. Talk of “corporate welfare” obscures the fact that the capitalist masters of this society always get full backing from the government that rules on their behalf.

Amazon became a global capitalist juggernaut not because it took advantage of tax codes and development funds (which it has) but as a result of the blood and sweat it has squeezed from its workers. The company is said to embody the changing nature of work—from its growing fleet of Amazon Flex drivers, independent “gig economy” contractors, to its emphasis on automation, including cashier-less Amazon Go stores and warehouse robots. However, more than anything, its operations underscore the unchanging workings of capitalism, which is based on maximizing private profit derived from the exploitation of labor.

There is no shortage of reasons to hate Amazon and its CEO, the richest man on the planet, who among other crimes have helped Homeland Security enhance its ability to hunt down immigrants. The company relies on low-paid, often temporary, labor and is notorious for treating its 600,000 employees worldwide like dirt. Inside Amazon’s warehouses, workers are all but barred from taking bathroom breaks, toil in unsafe conditions and are fired when they get injured. The same frenetic pace is imposed on Flex drivers, who get blacklisted for missing a delivery deadline. Amazon’s overriding priority is to keep out unions in order to maintain these sweatshop conditions.

The decision by Amazon to locate its headquarters and some 25,000 mainly white-collar jobs in Queens should have spurred the unions to jointly prepare a combative organizing drive. Amid last year’s headquarters derby, Amazon opened a new “fulfillment center” in Staten Island, its first in the state. The company has numerous such mega-warehouses in neighboring New Jersey. Enthusiasm for unionization has been on display at rallies for improved conditions involving Amazon warehouse workers in the region. Workers at Amazon’s grocery subsidiary, Whole Foods, have also been clamoring for a union. A real push to unionize Amazon in New York and New Jersey, where organized labor still has a critical mass, could be a spark for organizing the company across the board.

Rather than kicking off the necessary fight, union officials attached themselves to one or the other set of bickering Democrats. Building trades and SEIU 32BJ honchos cast their lot with Cuomo and de Blasio, most recently by signing a groveling open letter to Amazon requesting it reconsider the pullout. These union bureaucrats had invested a lot in Amazon’s promise to hire union contractors to build and clean the headquarters.

Whether that promise was empty or not, company executives were certainly not going to entertain the notion of their own employees joining a union. At a January City Council meeting, an Amazon VP bluntly rebuffed calls for the company to remain neutral if its workers try to unionize, declaring: “No, we would not agree to that.” The next day, having pinned hopes of organizing the Staten Island facility on just such a pledge, Stuart Applebaum of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and NYC Teamsters head George Miranda decried “Amazon’s refusal to simply remain neutral” (New York Daily News, 5 February). Playing a prominent role in the Democrat-sponsored “stop Amazon” protests, these labor traitors would have workers believe that moral suasion can convince the ruthless exploiters to “respect workers’ rights” and let the unions in the door.

What nonsense! Company assurances of noninterference in unionization efforts are not worth the paper they’re printed on. Neutrality is a sham; the interests of labor and capital are irreconcilably counterposed. Amazon workers would be well served to draw the lessons from the experience of auto workers in the South, where United Auto Workers (UAW) bureaucrats have hinged decades-long organizing efforts on obtaining such neutrality agreements from the bosses, to no avail (see “Defeat for Labor at Tennessee VW Plant,” WV No. 1042, 12 March 2014).

What is necessary is a return to the class-struggle methods that built the UAW, Teamsters and other industrial unions in the first place. The quarter-million Amazon workers across the country have tremendous potential social power—the ability to shut down operations at a company that plays a huge role in the U.S. economy. Amazon depends on the steady movement of goods through the “just in time” global cargo chain, with its key choke points. Many of these products are handled by longshoremen, truck drivers, airport and rail workers before arriving at Amazon’s warehouses. Solidarity action by unionized workers along the cargo chain would be vital to the fight to organize Amazon.

Unleashing that social power is a matter of leadership, a willingness to fight it out class against class, including in defiance of laws banning militant strike tactics. The trade-union bureaucracy, in contrast, is beholden to the bosses and their political representatives, especially the Democrats. Many are themselves fixtures in that party of the class enemy. Applebaum, for example, is a member of the DNC Executive Committee. The unions are mass organizations of workers to defend their economic interests against the capitalists; to consistently pursue that purpose they require a class-struggle leadership committed to the principle of complete political independence of the working class from the bosses and their parties.

Many politicians who railed against Amazon’s NYC HQ deal played to justified worries over the prospect of higher rents and other living costs with the arrival of its offices in Queens. Long before Amazon entered the equation, the city’s real estate magnates, slumlords and Wall Street bankers were driving up housing prices. The resulting gentrification has massively displaced working-class and poor residents, especially black people and Latinos, and swelled the ranks of the homeless. There is a way to defend the interests of Amazon workers as well as the ghetto and barrio poor: organizing strong unions as instruments of struggle for the felt needs of working people, including quality, low-cost, integrated public housing. To make this possible, there must be a fight to break the multiracial working class from the capitalist Democratic Party and to build a workers party dedicated to ending the whole system of capitalist wage slavery.

In response to the Cuomo-initiated open letter, those who want Amazon to stay away issued their own statement titled “New Yorkers Must Oppose Economic Development Policies that Give More Power to Billionaires and their Corporations over Our Communities’ Future” (1 March). Joining a host of liberal groups and community associations as signatories were the International Socialist Organization, the Party for Socialism and Liberation Queens and Socialist Alternative. These reformists are well versed in peddling fantasies that the capitalist system of exploitation can be made to meet the needs of workers and the oppressed. “Bottom up” economic development in the center of U.S. finance capital? Let’s get real.

Our goal is not just for the workers to unionize Amazon but ultimately to expropriate it, along with the productive forces of the entire capitalist class, through socialist revolution. Only then, with the introduction of collectivized property forms and centralized planning under workers rule, will economic development serve the interests of society as a whole and not the profits of a few.